The Divine Devil's fruit wasn't as bad as the Spirit Cleansing lily in terms of difficulty on when and how to pick it.
The how part was incredibly simple. You just picked it like any other fruit. There was no specific way on how to pick it, just when.
For a Divine Devil's fruit to be usable, you must pick it when it is between 120 years and 123 years old. Any fruit picked out of that range was useless.
If picked too early, you would end up with something that would actually poison you. That was what had happened to the city lord's mother. If not for him having accidentally made a pill that could help her sweat out the filth in her body, she would've forever been in a coma.
If picked too late, however, while you would still end up with a useless fruit when it came to Mortal Cleansing, you could plant it to grow a new Divine Devil's plant and grow more fruit.
If it were a place with constant visits, one could keep track of all the fruits that grew in there and figure out when one should pick them. However, due to the nature of this place, no one could keep track of anything at all.
That was considering they even knew it.
Alex went next to one of the black and white fruit and placed his hand on it. Thanks to the knowledge he had, he could easily figure out how old the fruit was.
'39 years,' he thought and left the fruit. That was too young to be of any use. '159 years, I can plant this somewhere outside.'
He took the fruit and stored it before moving on to the next one.
After 3 such more fruits, he finally found one that was 121 years old. "Nice," he thought and picked it, storing it separately from the rest.
He went through the rest as well and found 3 more that you could eat and about 7 that you could plant. Even if he found ones that could not be eaten, Alex would've considered his current findings an absolute win.
He note down the rest of the fruits and their years in a talisman so that he could give it to others that would benefit from it. Why waste such a treasure after all?
Once he was done, he and Whisker left the forest and moved to the grassland outside where he sat down to cultivate.
Alex cultivated until the sun was part of the way into the sky. It had been more than 8 hours since he stopped and so he was now on the move again, to find different ingredients and treasures.
He met up with a few different people along the way and grimaced when he saw the lack of ingredients in the area.
He went to some other place and found other ingredients.
One such place was a flower field that grew many different types of flowers. However, there was a single flower there that caught Alex's eye.
"Wait, is that?"
He quickly ran up to it and as he did its scent hit him. "It really is," he said excitedly. "Whisker look, it's the Soul Elucidating Tulip."
The Soul Elucidating Tulips was a flower whose scent would cause one to lose their normal thought process, trancing one to think about something for a very long time.
It was the flower that made Dao mountain what it was.
Alex learned about the flower and realized that the scent wasn't the only thing that could force one to learn a dao. Even consuming the flower petals would force one to do the same, perhaps with a stronger effect as well.
If Alex could add some other ingredients to it to enhance its effect, it was most likely that he could make the Dao pill that the 10 council members had asked of him.
It would be very helpful if he could do that.
He started collecting the various flowers that were spread all around the field along with Whisker. He found hundreds of such flowers and was incredibly happy.
Once he got everything he wanted, he left that area as well.
Another few days passed and the day had come for the secret realm to open again. Alex needed to finish what he could here and make his way towards the center where the gate would open.
He had collected what he could already. He had been to the end of the river where he found various different flowers and fruits with Water Qi in them.
He had been to a rather rocky location where he found ingredients with Earth Qi in them. These would all be of extreme help to him in making the ingredients for the two pills in the next few months.
Alex looked around the field where he was in and shook his head in disappointment. There was barely anything here at all.
"Come on Whisker, we need to leave," Alex said. Whisker grumbled a bit, asking for a few more minutes so he could gather what remaining ingredients were here before they could leave.
Alex nodded and helped him with the task. After doing what they could, they started making their way back toward the gate.
The path back wasn't that long. It was just two mountains away. Alex and Whisker crossed the river to get to the first mountain. Once crossing the river, there was a small but thick forest with tall trees full of leaves.
He checked the area with his spiritual sense to see what was left behind by those that had come here before him. As he expected, there were still many things here that the people simply didn't know were an ingredient.
Heck, even he himself didn't know what sort of pills those ingredients could help in. All he knew was that they would.
"Should we stop by?" Alex asked. Whisker nodded, but Alex wasn't sure if he wanted to. There was no time to waste as the secret realm's gate would open at any time.
"Let me check if there is anything worth taking. If there is, we will get it, otherwise, we leave," Alex said to Whisker, but it was mostly for himself.
His spiritual sense spread around the forest, searching for anything of value. There were other spiritual senses that passed him in this time, some most likely wondering why he wasn't leaving, but Alex ignored them for the moment.
"I can't seem to find anything that's so good that we have to stop," Alex said to Whisker who was sitting inside his robes. "I think it will be better to just—"
He stopped. He had noticed something that was… well, he wasn't sure.
"What is that?" he thought. There was something in him that moved him towards this thing, surprising himself. It had been a while since his feeling for an ingredient had been this bad. He thought he was jaded to it by now, but it seemed he was not.
Of course, it would be stupid to think a mere Saint realm cultivator like him could overpower the intent of someone that was called a god.
Alex slowly floated down to check on it. He arrived next to a massive tree with roots that came out of the ground. The tree was thick and alive, not that he cared about that at the moment. It was not the tree that was calling him either, but something growing on it like parasites.
Mushrooms.
Along the bottom of the tree, a place where sunlight barely fell and the mist from the river constantly flowed in, there was a mossy patch on the tree and the ground where many pure white mushrooms were growing.
It was certainly a surprise for him that something like this was even growing. After all, the description that was given for it in his head was way too ridiculous to trust at all.
According to the information, the mushroom was called a World Defying Mushroom. The name was grand for something like a mushroom, but if what he was learning was correct, then it was definitely deserving of that name.
A World Defying Mushroom was an ingredient that could be used in any and every pill-making session. The mushroom itself wasn't an ingredient, but it could be used nonetheless.
The mushroom had no elemental energy of its own, but it could copy others. Like a blank canvas, it could take an ingredient and copy its energy to become just like the ingredient.
That alone was a terrifying ability, making the mushroom incredibly useful as it could copy ingredients that were very, very rare. However, there was only so much energy it could transform itself to, and even if it could copy ingredients, it couldn't do so for very long.
After a while, it would lose energy and end up as a useless item. Aside from that, there was also the problem of the mushroom having a different composition which made the recipes not work anymore.
But, there was something else it could do that was incredible. Since the mushroom was capable of copying energy, it could copy finalized energy too.
That was to say, at the end of a pill-making session, if the ingredients used were of poor quality, you could put one of these into the cauldron, and suddenly you would have additional energy floating around, all created by the mushroom.
As long as you kept the mushroom's powder separate, you could collect the energy onto the pill, gaining a very much successful pill with a very high harmony.
Any alchemist would kill to be able to get that.
